Chaco Canyon, Its World, and Ours

The Linguistic Evidence for Navajo Origins

Although it can be rather difficult to define what it means to be Navajo, it is quite clear from a variety of lines of evidence that speakers of Athapaskan languages, including Navajo and the various Apache languages, have not been in the Southwest for very long compared to most of the other language groups there, and that they came originally from somewhere in Alaska or northern Canada, where Athapaskan languages are also spoken. This has a number of implications for the culture history of the Southwest, so it’s useful to review just how it is that we are so sure that the Navajos came from the north.

Abandoned Hogan at Tsaya Trading Post, Lake Valley, New Mexico

Linguistic evidence in the form of the distribution of related languages can be a very helpful guide to understanding prehistoric population movements and other events, but it can be very difficult to interpret. For one thing, not all language families are equally plausible groupings. Also, even when a group of languages can be convincingly shown to be related, the events that resulted in their known distribution can be hard to determine from the evidence available. Both of these factors are clearly important in trying to understand the linguistic map of California, which seems bewilderingly complex at first glance and never really gets any simpler. Despite the unfortunate way that particular map uses similar colors to identify the various language families, it is a pretty typical example of the way the families are shown, and it makes the problems inherent in this sort of exercise pretty obvious.

California Welcome Sign

The map groups the languages into six families: Penutian, Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Athapascan, Yukian, and Algonquian. This classification seems to imply that these six groups are all somehow comparable entities, but that isn’t actually the case at all. Uto-Aztecan, Athapascan (i.e., Athapaskan, to which Navajo also belongs), and Algonquian are among the largest, best-documented, and most thoroughly studied language families in North America, and their reality as entities is not in any doubt. All the attested languages in these groups clearly descend from proto-languages that can be reconstructed in considerable detail. While there is still considerable dispute about how the languages in these far-flung families ended up where they are, there’s no real doubt that they are in fact related and that arguments about migrations and such can proceed from that basis.

Morro Bay, California

I don’t know much about Yukian, but it’s a small family that seems to only include a few languages (maybe just one) in California. This is hardly unusual; there are many such small families, and while they don’t usually provide much evidence for culture history, they aren’t generally controversial as groupings.

Post Office, Independence, California

The trouble comes with the two remaining groups, Penutian and Hokan. The status of these as families is very shaky, and many scholars don’t accept that they actually have any reality, being instead just rather arbitrary groupings of many unrelated languages with some superficial similarities. I don’t know enough about these issues to have an opinion, but in general I’m skeptical about families like these. And, of course, if the languages in one or both of these families aren’t actually related that drastically reduces the amount of information that can be gained from looking at their distribution relative to each other and to other language groups.

Post Office, Shoshone, California

With that whole issue in mind, and accepting for the sake of argument that Penutian and Hokan do count as real families, lets look at the distribution of the families and see what it might tell us about the prehistory of California. One of the most striking things about the map is that only one of the six families has an entirely contiguous distribution. This is Algonquian, which only includes two languages in California: Yurok and Wiyot, way up in the northwest. (There are, of course, many more Algonquian languages outside of California.) All the other families are mostly contiguous, but interrupted by other language groups at various places. Two come close; both the Penutian and Uto-Aztecan groups only have a single outlying language and are otherwise contiguous. Uto-Aztecan is actually contiguous in reality, since the Uto-Aztecan languages along the eastern border of the state continue into Nevada, where they end up connecting to the Northern Paiute territory in the northeast corner. Penutian, however, is clearly discontinuous, with Modoc at the northern edge of the state separated from Wintu to the south by the Hokan languages Shasta and Achumawi. Hokan itself is not contiguous at all; in fact, it seems to consist of a variety of languages on the fringes of more contiguous families. This is one of the reasons a lot of people don’t buy that it is a real family. Finally, Yukian and Athapaskan seem to be very nearly contiguous in their small areas, with Yukian disrupted by Pomo and Patwin and Athapaskan by the Algonquian languages.

Entrance Sign, Death Valley National Park

What do these patterns of contiguity and interruption mean? One popular way to interpret them is as indicating migrations of intrusive groups that separate formerly contiguous language families. In many places this type of analysis works well, but in California it’s tricky. Who is interrupting whom here? Clearly the Algonquians seem to have driven a wedge between the two sets of Athapaskan groups, and the Pomo and/or Patwin have probably done something similar to the Yukians, but otherwise it’s hard to tell. A lot depends on who was where first. If the Hokans originally occupied almost the whole state, as their fragmented distribution seems to suggest, then a Penutian migration from the north and a Uto-Aztecan one from the northeast seem plausible. On the other hand, if the Penutians were there first, then a series of Hokan migrations surrounding them, followed by migrations of the other groups breaking up whatever Hokan continuum had resulted, makes sense. I don’t have an answer to these questions, which have vexed historical linguists for decades. I’m just using this case as an example of how difficult it can be to use language family distributions to infer culture history.

Navajo Exhibit at Chaco Visitor Center Museum

With that in mind, let’s turn back to the Navajos. As I mentioned earlier, the Athapaskan family is one of the best-known on the continent, so it’s quite certain that all the Athapaskan languages are related and derive from a common proto-language. Their widely scattered distribution, then, definitely looks like the result of a series of migrations. Since the largest area occupied by speakers of Athapaskan languages is in the north, it seems reasonable to conclude that they originated there and that the smaller areas along the Pacific coast and in the Southwest are the result of migrations. The greater number of Athapaskan languages in Alaska and Canada, and the greater diversity among them, also argues for this point.

Cottonwoods along Shonto Wash, Shonto, Arizona

All these considerations, which are important in answering questions about the nature and direction of migrations, are what might be called “external” linguistic evidence. They are linguistic in the sense of being about language, but they don’t have anything to do with the specific characteristics of the languages in question. “Internal” linguistic evidence, on the other hand, involves looking carefully at the vocabulary and structure of the languages themselves and trying to see what, if any, conclusions about culture history can be drawn from it. This is hard work, and not necessarily rewarding, and it’s no surprise that it’s much less frequently used in these discussions. When it is, though, it has the potential to shine an interesting light on these questions, and it provides a clear way to confirm or disprove conclusions derived from other evidence.

Snow-Covered Hogans, Shonto, Arizona

Internal evidence often consists of things like loanwords and other evidence of contact with other languages, but Athapaskan languages rarely borrow many words from the languages around them, and Navajo in particular is notorious for its shockingly low level of borrowed vocabulary given the long association of the Navajos with other peoples. Thus, with Navajo, answers have to be sought in more subtle places. The famous linguist Edward Sapir wrote an article in 1936 taking a look at this very issue, and he found out some interesting things. He noted, however, that this sort of evidence is only really useful as an adjunct to external evidence, which is particularly overwhelming in this case:

I shall try to show that there is tangible evidence in Navaho itself for the secondary origin of apparently fundamental elements of Navaho culture, such as agriculture, and that such evidence seems to point to an early association of the culture of these people with a more northern environment than their present one. It may be said—and with justice—that the distribution of the Athapaskan languages is such as to make this historical theory as good as certain, but dialectic distribution is external, rather than internal, linguistic evidence. It is conceivable, if not plausible, that the Athapaskan-speaking tribes were originally massed in the Southwest and gradually rayed out to the north in successive waves of migration. One might argue that the Navaho and, to a greater degree, the various Apache tribes present the non-Pueblo aspect they do, not because of their relative recency in the area of Pueblo cultural development but because, like the Walapai and other Yuman tribes of Arizona, they represent a simpler and more archaic Southwestern culture, which proved impervious, aside from a late Pueblo veneer, to the influence of the more elaborate cultures in their neighborhood. It is true that the linguistic homogeneity of the Southern Athapaskan dialects is such and the dialectic cleavages in the northern Athapaskan area are so profound that the suggested theory fails to carry conviction either to the linguist or to the ethnologist, but here again we are dealing with external linguistic evidence. This external evidence is far more compelling than can be any evidence derived from details of dialectic structure or vocabulary, for it is more direct and sweeping. None the less, the more elusive internal linguistic evidence has its place in giving confirmation to a hypothesis based on linguistic distributions.

Note, by the way, the total lack of any mention of archaeology here. Both the internal and external evidence for the migration of the Navajos and Apaches into the Southwest come entirely from linguistics, which means, among other things, that there is no way to date that migration.

Shonto Trading Post, Shonto, Arizona

Sapir comes up with four words with interesting etymologies that seem to confirm that the ancestors of the Navajos at one point probably did not live in the Southwest:

The Navajo word for “gourd” is ‘adee’, which also means “dipper” or “ladle” (dippers and ladles in the Southwest generally being made from gourds). Etymologically, however, the word ‘adee’ clearly means “(animal’s) horn,” and there is plenty of evidence from both Northern and Southern Athapaskan languages to show that the development of this word to “ladle” is a Southern Athapaskan development, while the further shift to “gourd” is unique to Navajo. This suggests that the ancestors of the Navajos and Apaches originally made ladles out of animal horns, and that the Navajos later began using gourd ladles like the Pueblos but called them by the term they had earlier used for the horn dippers, eventually extending the use of the term to the gourd in general, as well as to dippers made of other materials.

Navajo has a verb sisas meaning “to lie” that applies specifically to seeds being planted, along with a related verb naasas meaning “to sprinkle” referring to not only seeds but also other granular substances such as sand. There are no cognates to these verbs in other Athapaskan languages, which suggests that they are likely derived from a noun, which in this case clearly seems to be yas (or zas), “snow,” cognates of which are found throughout Athapaskan. This suggests that the ancestors of the Navajos were not familiar with agriculture but were very familiar with snow.

The Navajo word for “corn” (i.e., maize) is naad́ą́́ą́’. The second syllable is clearly an old word meaning “food,” but the first syllable is more mysterious and not obviously interpretable by native speakers. Sapir argues, however, that it derives from a term found throughout Athapaskan meaning “enemy” (or, perhaps better, “foreign”) and often used in the names of other tribes. This term is probably most familiar to readers of this blog from the term ‘anaasází; if in fact this means “enemy ancestor,” this is the term involved. In the case of corn, the original meaning would be “enemy’s food” or “food of the foreigners,” presumably meaning the Pueblos and implying that at the time they first encountered corn Navajos not only didn’t farm themselves but perceived agriculture as something foreign to their own culture.

There is an odd verb root, -kééł in the imperfect, used in only a few fixed, idiomatic phrases, that can’t be easily interpreted by native speakers. One of the more colorful uses of it is as the sacred name for the owl, chahałheeł yił náákéłí, “the one who [?]s back with darkness.” From this and other contexts in which it is used, the verb clearly refers to some sort of motion, but otherwise there is no way to understand it within Navajo. Outside of Navajo and Apache, however, and particularly in the northern Athapaskan languages, this root has a straightforward and very interesting meaning: “to travel by canoe.” This is a common way to get around in northern Canada, of course, but not so useful in the Southwest, and the Navajos seem to have lost all cultural memory of it aside from these few fixed phrases. The owl, however, is still “he who brings darkness back in his canoe.”

It’s really only the fourth of these that associates the Navajos with a specifically northern origin; the others just imply that they were originally unfamiliar with agriculture, which could have happened if they had been hunter-gatherers in their current location (where it does snow). Taken together with the other lines of evidence, however, these words further confirm the idea that the Navajos originally came from the north, and in addition they offer interesting glimpses of the Navajo past.Sapir, E. (1936). Internal Linguistic Evidence Suggestive of the Northern Origin of the Navaho American Anthropologist, 38 (2), 224-235 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1936.38.2.02a00040

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2 Responses

Those historical linguists, with their evidence and models that have us plotting prehistoric migrations across half the globe. I’d really like to find a way to throw this particular baby out with the bathwater, and not just because I’m biased in favour of explanations that favour (linguistic) innovation over “genetic” descent.
(And haven’t we more-or-less thrown out Sapir? Shows what I know. )
But what I’m really going marking up your comments is saying that there are some darn fine photographs on this site, and I was especially impressed by the “post office” pair.